Beware the 4-spacening this week (25 May)

This week we will be converting Vanilla to a 4-space indent system from our current 3-space indent system per the coding standard we adopted last year. This is for our pull request authors - if you're in the middle of something, this change will undoubtedly cause a merge conflict. A diff program like Kaleidoscope should help you easily resolve it, but it will be a little extra work.

It seems most if not all coding standard all spaces now a day. Some 2x, some 4x but I can understand the use of space is more universality across platform and IDE. I use various editor for the task and by using spaces it would be more consistent in any IDE.

@chanh said:
It seems most if not all coding standard all spaces now a day. Some 2x, some 4x but I can understand the use of space is more universality across platform and IDE. I use various editor for the task and by using spaces it would be more consistent in any IDE.

Except that with tabs you can make them look as you like. For example, I don't like four spaces, too "wide". With hard spaces, there's nothing to do, apart from the usual search and replace. With tabs, you can tell the editor to show one tab as two spaces, and you're ready to go. If you like four spaces, you can still set the editor accordingly.

@businessdad said:
Except that with tabs you can make them look as you like. For example, I don't like four spaces, too "wide". With hard spaces, there's nothing to do, apart from the usual search and replace. With tabs, you can tell the editor to show one tab as two spaces, and you're ready to go. If you like four spaces, you can still set the editor accordingly.

This works perfectly fine for indentation purposes. If you are trying to make your code look pretty and use tabs, bad things can happen if the tab is narrower than expected. At this point it is really splitting hairs.

tabs are nice only if you is the only person work on your code and you only use one editor but if there are lot of people working the code and use various editor, tabs can create headache and look ugly too!